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Data managers should emulate good librarians

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Haul away the hardware, peel off the software, rinse off the mystique and you see what the people who manage data really are: They’re librarians. That’s the role IT workers should model themselves on.

I’m not talking about technology. I don’t care what tools anyone uses. Whether we’re talking about bound paper known as “books” or bits magically transmitted over “wi-fi,” I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.

I know, the comparison may seem harsh. Librarians are said to shuffle silently among musty old books that no one ever reads. Or, as my friend Karen Schneider puts it, they’re “some misguided brontosaurus snuffling in the antediluvian biblioforest.”… Read the rest “Data managers should emulate good librarians”

Librarian looks up a real “solution”

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A friend of mine runs the library at a small university near me, and she hears pitches all the time for neat technology. I suppose she doesn’t hear much about BI, just library stuff, but let’s not get hung up on the details.

To keep her priorities straight, she keeps a “ruthless focus” on the library’s real needs. She keeps Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in mind, the theory that people satisfy needs in order, from basic needs like breathing all the way up to “self actualization.”

She tells about one upstate New York librarian she heard about back when libraries were first urged to go online.… Read the rest “Librarian looks up a real “solution””

Meet the “metador”

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Information Management editorial director Jim Ericson writes about the modern corporate librarian, the “metador.” He talked to that term’s creator, Bob Boiko.

Boiko says the people he trains or identifies are not usually tech-savvy people, nor do they seek to be. He sees them as natively talented indexers or organizers who might not be called to the job of subject matter expert. “An indexer is already a metator because they’re adding extra information to tag or otherwise make sure information is accessible. A really good indexer doesn’t need to be a subject matter expert and in some senses it’s better if they’re not, because they can make the information base accessible to others who don’t already know the lingo.”

… Read the rest “Meet the “metador””